Some Ancient Scots-Irish-Swedish Sources for “Antient” Freemasonry

Marsha Keith Schuchard

Marsha Keith Schuchard can’t be present at ICOM 2017 in May at Toulon (France) because of her academic obligations in USA. As she wants to contribute to this worldwide conference, by courtesy she decided to share the topic previously planned in ICOM 2017. (Michel Lecour)

As this conference will address the impact of “Ancient” Freemasonry in the eighteenth-century, I think it will be useful to begin with an acknowledgment of the differences in scholarly opinion about the early roots and later ramifications of the British fraternity (“British” encompassing England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). Contrasting perspectives are presented by two distinguished historians, professors Margaret Jacob and David Stevenson, with the former stressing the modern, rationalistic “Enlightenment” attitudes of Freemasonry and the latter noting its ancient, occultist “Renaissance” themes. In her provocative book, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (1988), Jacob affirmed that “In Hanoverian England, Whiggery provided the beliefs and values, while Freemasonry provided one temple wherein some of its most devoted followers worshipped the God of Newtonian Science.”¹ Certainly, that was true for an important type of Masonry in England, but there were other competing types in greater Britain, with deeper roots in sixteenth-century Scotland and Ireland and with significant interests in Renaissance esoteric traditions.

In his ground-breaking work on early Scottish Freemasonry, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710 (1988), Stevenson revealed the late Renaissance linkage in Scotland between operative “craft masonry” and the Cabalistic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian “sciences.”² He differed from those historians who portray Freemasonry as a generically Enlightenment institution, noting that the fraternity contained elements “that appear highly incongruous in the Age of Enlightenment”:

In essence freemasonry is a late Renaissance phenomenon. Its astonishing expansion in the eighteenth century saw it adapt itself to some extent, to a new age, but in many ways it remained a movement which fits better into the world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than into the world of the Enlightenment.³

Though Stevenson did not analyse the Jacobite developments in eighteenth-century Masonry, Jacob’s own research revealed the significance of supporters of the Stuart cause in European, Ḗcossais Masonry, which she found disconcerting:

Generally historians have not known quite what to do with the stalwart but exiled Jacobites except to see them as romantic patrons of an essentially lost, and backward-looking cause. When their cause merges with a commitment to freemasonry, defined as progressive and modern in its aspirations and outlook, the historian is confounded by an ostensible paradox.⁴

I examine this “paradox” in a forthcoming book, Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics: From Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding, in which I discuss the way in which Scots-Irish Masonry maintained the early Stuart-Renaissance interests in Jewish mysticism, Hermetic alchemy, and Rose-Croix chivalry, while at the same time advocating religious toleration and egalitarian relations within the lodges (the latter attitudes were indeed “enlightened”). Though the Grand Lodge of England, organized in 1717 to support the Hanoverian succession and Whig politics, has hitherto received the most attention from historians, its decline in prestige and power in the 1740s opened the door to a revival of those earlier “Celtic” traditions, which were implemented in the newly organized Grand Lodge of the “Antients” in 1751.⁵ In the following narrative, I will discuss the “ancient” sources of those traditions and briefly trace their development from the 1450s to the 1770s. But let us begin with the “upstart” Irish in the mid-eighteenth century.

*  *  *

Research on Irish Freemasonry has long been hampered by the lack of written documents, for, as Chetwode Crawley explained,

It was a point of honour with the Irish Freemasons . . . to prevent any written information or authorization, concerned with the Craft from passing out of fraternal keeping. The Irish Freemason held it to be his plain duty to destroy any document, public or private, historical or evidential, sooner than let it pass to the hands of outsiders. Warrants, Certificates, Lodge Registers and Minute Books shared the common fate.⁶

This tradition of secrecy and silence was compounded by the problem of widespread Jacobitism in Ireland, which placed many disaffected Masons (both Catholic and Protestant) under government surveillance. With regular government interception of mail and confiscation of private papers, Irish Jacobites and their Masonic sympathizers were extremely cautious about putting anything controversial or seditious in writing. Fortunately, the current revival of international Jacobite studies is bringing long-buried sources to the surface and shedding new light on the early historical background and contemporary context of “Antient” Freemasonry.

On 17 July 1751, the Masters of six Irish lodges in London joined together to form a dissident “Antients” Grand Lodge, in opposition to what would be called the “Modern” Grand Lodge of England, composed mainly of loyalist supporters of the Whig-Hanoverian government. A year later, an Irish immigrant painter, Laurence Dermott, was elected Grand Secretary of the new system, and he brought with him a knowledge of older Scots-Irish Masonic traditions that emphasized Cabalistic themes that were not included in the English Grand Lodge system and which were not publicized in James Anderson’s official Constitutions of the Free Masons (London, 1723; rev. ed. 1738). Over the next years, Dermott published his versions of the Antients’ history and regulations in Ahiman Rezon: or, a Help to a Brother; Shewing the Excellence of Secrecy, and the first Cause, or Motive, of the Institution of Free-Masonry (London, 1756; rev. eds. 1764 and 1778). In the process, he revived ancient Scots-Irish (“Celtic”) traditions that had earlier been revealed by the great Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

Dermott dedicated the 1756 version to William Stewart, 3rd Viscount Mountjoy and Earl of Blessington, a former Irish Grand Master and supporter of Swift in the Dean’s campaigns against English oppression of Ireland.⁷ He included a theatrical prologue by Thomas Griffith, an Irish Mason and friend of Swift, and an oratorio, Solomon’s Temple, by James Eyre Weekes, an “ancient” Irish Mason, who in 1745 published a Masonic poem in praise of the recently-deceased Swift.⁸ In Dermott’s 1778 edition, he boasted about the successful spread of the Antients’ system and the wide sales of Ahiman Rezon by featuring on the title-page a quote from Swift:

As for his Works, in Verse or Prose,
I own myself no Judge of those;
Nor can I tell what Criticks thought ’em,
But this I know, all People bought ’em.
— Swift

Like the satirical Dean, Dermott would provoke suspicions of political sedition and crypto-Jacobitism among loyalist Hanoverian Masons, the “Moderns,” whom he would so gleefully mock. But both men were careful to cover their more risky political tracks, while continuing to serve Irish patriotic interests.

Dermott came from an extended Irish family, most of whom were Catholics, which sent many young men abroad to serve in the Irish Brigades of the French and Spanish armies, often characterized as the Stuarts’ secret military force. The family, also known as the MacDermots, was “extremely active in Freemasonry in the eighteenth century,” and one member, Clement MacDermott (son of Terence MacDermott, former Jacobite Lord Mayor of Dublin), was an initiate of the Jacobite lodge in Paris in 1725.⁹ Sean Murphy argues that Laurence Dermott was “almost certainly of the Jacobite-connected MacDermott family of Strokestown, C. Roscommon,” a claim supported by Ken MacDermot Roe.¹⁰ Ric Berman counters that Dermott was a Protestant and Irish patriot, but probably not a Jacobite.¹¹ Given the English government’s crushing of the Jacobite rebellion in 1746, which provoked the execution of three Jacobite Grand Masters (Derwentwater, Kilmarnock, and Balmerino) and the more recent public beheading in 1753 of the Scottish Freemason, Dr. Archibald Cameron, for Jacobite plotting, Dermott’s cautious political statements in 1756 are understandable.¹²

A Mason is a Lover of Quiet; is always subject to the civil Powers, provided they do not infringe upon the limited Bounds of Religion and Reason. And it was never yet known that a real Craftsman was concerned in any dark Plot, Designs, or Contrivances against the State… But as Masonry hath at several Times felt the injurious Effects of War, Bloodshed, and Devastation, it was a stronger Engagement to the Craftsmen to act agreeable to the Rules of Peace and Loyalty, the many Proofs of which Behaviour hath occasioned the ancient Kings and Powers to protect and defend them. But if a Brother should be so far unhappy as to rebel against the State, he would meet with no Countenance from his Fellows; nor would they keep any private Converse with him, whereby the Government might have Cause to be jealous, or take the least Umbrage.¹³

But Dermott also repeated Anderson’s political statement of 1723, written during a time of Jacobite-Hanoverian struggles for control of the English Grand Lodge, that “though a Brother is not to be countenanced in his Rebellion against the State, yet, if convicted of no other Crime, his Relation to the Lodge remains indefeasible.”¹⁴

Given the disaffection of many Irish Masons from English governmental policies, Dermott was wise to avoid political controversy, while he determined to preserve the older traditions of Stuart Freemasonry that emphasized Cabalistic-Lullist mystical themes—themes that Swift had revealed in his anonymous pamphlet, A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Free-Masons to Mr. Harding the Printer (Dublin, 1724). Dermott was probably aware that Swift was identified as the author in the London edition of his works in 1746.¹⁵ What set Ahiman Rezon (1756) apart from Anderson’s Constitutions was Dermott’s stress on the Cabalistic sources of Masonic rituals and symbolism:

. . . there were but very few Masters of the Art (even) at Solomon’s Temple: Whereby it plainly appears, that the whole Mystery was communicated to very few at that Time; that at Solomon’s Temple (and not before) it received the Name of Free-Masonry, because the Masons at Jerusalem and Tyre were the greatest Cabalists* then in the World; that the Mystery has been, for the most Part, practiced amongst Builders since Solomon’s Time . . .

* People skilled in the Cabala, i.e., Tradition, their secret Science of expounding divine Myteries, etc.¹⁶

He included “A Prayer said at the Opening of the Lodge, etc., used by Jewish Free-Masons,” in which they affirm, “number us not among those that know not thy Statutes, nor the divine Mysteries of the secret Cabala.”¹⁷ He concluded the volume of lodge transactions (1751-57) with his sketch of the Seal of Solomon and Masonic geometrical emblems containing Hebrew letters and phrases in Hebrew.¹⁸ He would later converse in Hebrew with a visiting “Arabian Mason.”¹⁹ Among the subscribers to Ahiman Rezon were many Jewish Masons, who flocked to the Antients’ lodges in significant numbers.²⁰

Dermott linked the Cabalistic traditions to the Irish-French “higher degrees” of the Royal Arch, which described the discovery made by Zerubbabel and the rebuilders of the Second Jerusalem Temple of the “Lost Word”—the unutterable Hebrew Name of God—in a vault under a surviving arch of the destroyed First Temple. He thus included “A HABATH OLAM. A Prayer repeated in the Royal Arch Lodge at Jerusalem,” in which the initiate vows his trust “in thy Holy, Great, Mighty, and Terrible NAME.”²¹ He then declared that the Royal Arch is “the Root, Heart, and Marrow of Masonry.” The English Grand Lodge refused to accept the Royal Arch as part of its system. Eight years later, in 1764, Dermott added a new frontispiece to his revised edition, with the explanation that it had been designed by “that famous and learned hebrewist, architect, and brother, Rabbi Jacob Jehudah Leon,” who in 1675 brought his famous model of the Temple to London and dedicated his published descriptions of the Tabernacle and Temple to the restored Stuart king, Charles II.²² Leon’s Jewish heraldic imagery was then reportedly adopted by Irish Masons in the 1680s.²³

Dermott and the Antients claimed that they drew upon the more ancient and authentic traditions of Scots-Irish Masonry, which had also been preserved in York and in France by exiled Jacobites and their French supporters. A clue to the contents of those traditions was provided by Swift, who in 1724 published his “Celtic” counter history to that given in Anderson’s Whig-Hanoverian, “modern” Constitutions in 1723. In his rollicking, high-spirited Letter from the Grand Mistress, Swift drew on his experiences of Masonry in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1688, when he and his friend John Jones composed a comical Tripos that satirized the college lodge. They referred to a new ritual of being “freemazoniz’d a new way” and to Scottish traditions from Berwick-on-Tweed.²⁴ In 1695, when Swift was reluctantly sent to Presbyterian-dominated Ulster as an Anglican minister, he visited a lodge at Omagh and learned more about Scottish traditions that had been brought to northern Ireland since the early 17th century. In a burlesque of Anderson’s credulous, Anglo-centric history, he gave a Scots-Irish version of Masonic history:

The Branch of the Lodge of Solomon’s Temple, afterwards called the Lodge of St. John of Jerusalem…is, as I can easily prove, the Antientist and Purest now on Earth. The famous old Scottish lodge of Kilwinnin of which all the Kings of Scotland have been from Time to Time Grand Masters without interruption, down from the days of Fergus, who reigned more than 2000 years ago, long before the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem or the Knights of Malta, to which lodges I nevertheless allow the Honour of having adorned the Antient Jewish and Pagan Masonry with Religious and Christian Rules.

Fergus…was carefully instructed in all the Arts and Sciences, especially in the Natural Magick, and the Caballistical Philosophy (afterwards called the Rosecrution) by the Pagan Druids of Ireland and Mona, the only true Caballists then Extant in the Western World… I am told by Men of Learning that the Occult as well as Moral Philosophy of all the Pagans was well besprinkled and enrich’d from the Caballistical School of the Patriarchs . . . and Rabbins . . .

Jason . . . went in Quest of the Golden Fleece as it is call’d in the Enigmaticall Terms of Free-Masonry, or properly speaking of the Cabala, as Masonry was call’d in those Days. . . . Mr. Harding, if duly encourag’d by Subscribers [will print] a Key to Raymundus Lullius, without whose Help our Guardian says it’s impossible to come at the Quintessence of Free Masonry.²⁵

Galloping comically through these Celtic Masonic traditions, Swift touched on some important but little-known themes that can be traced back to Renaissance Scotland. And his reference to Ramon Lull provides a good starting point for my narrative, which will chronologically trace some “ancient” sources of the “Antients.” Why did Swift assert that the teachings of Lull, the 13th-century Spanish mystic and polymath, could provide a key to the very essence of Masonry? Lull had drawn on Cabalistic and Sufi mystical teachings to develop mnemonic and meditation techniques that made possible encyclopedic learning and architectural visualization, which he believed were useful accomplishments for stonemasons and other craftsmen, and for his friends among the crusading Knights Templar, who could thus become “illuminated” knights.²⁶

In the mid-15th century, these Lullist techniques were brought to Scotland, where William St. Clair, Earl of Orkney and Caithness, commissioned the translation into Scots English of Lull’s L’Ordre de Chivalrie, which Sir Gilbert Hay undertook in 1456 in the scriptorium of Roslin Castle.²⁷ This was the first translation of Lull into English, and it took place during St. Clair’s management and active participation in the design and construction of the fantastic Gothic chapel at Roslin, which featured exotic Solomonic and Hiramic symbolism. Fifteen years earlier, in 1441, St. Clair had been appointed “Patron and Protector of Scottish Masons” by the Scottish king, James II, and the office became hereditary in the family until 1736. Lullist writings were preserved at Roslin throughout the seventeenth century and, according to Swift, the Spaniard’s ideas remained significant in Scots-Irish Masonry. Though Lullist themes were not included in “modern” English Freemasonry, they continued to be studied in various Jacobite-influenced, Ḗcossais “higher” degrees in the eighteenth century.²⁸

In 1583 another Stuart king, the Protestant James VI, took upon himself the title, “Scotland’s Solomon,” and he appointed the Catholic architect William Schaw as Master of Works to counter the influence of iconoclastic, militant Presbyterians.²⁹ While the king worked closely with Schaw, he studied the writings of Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur Du Bartas, who drew upon Cabalistic and Lullist traditions in his religious poetry. James translated Du Bartas’s poem Uranie and hoped that his new royal architect could play the role of the Biblical Bezaleel and Hiram in recreating Solomon’s Temple. Du Bartas included much architectural and masonic imagery in the poem, and James translated the following lines:

. . . Hiram’s holy help it was unknown
What he in building Israel’s Temple had shown,
Without Gods Ark Beseleel Jew had been
In everlasting silence buried clean.
Then, since the beauty of those works most rare
Hath after death made live all of them that were
Their builders . . .³⁰

In 1594 James VI determined to celebrate the birth of Prince Henry Stuart by rebuilding the Chapel Royal at Stirling according to the design and dimensions of Solomon’s Temple. He and Schaw sought out and employed the best stonemasons and craftsmen, “with his Majesty’s own person daily overseer” of the construction.³¹ Aeonghus MacKechnie observes that “Schaw’s sophisticated design made the chapel a paradigmatic example of the Scottish Renaissance, important both for James’s kingship and the history of freemasonry.”³² James’s project of rebuilding the Temple was linked with his praise for a contemporary crusading order, for in the accompanying royal masque, the king; John Erskine, 1st Earl of Mar; and Thomas Erskine played the role of Knights of Malta who took the field against the infidel Turks.³³ Mar was a brilliant mathematician, and he used his expertise to assist his father on the family’s architectural and Masonic projects.³⁴ With Mar, Schaw, and his Masons in attendance, James knighted sixteen nobles and gave them instructions in their chivalric duties. It was perhaps here that the tradition began that the Scottish Knights of Malta were also Freemasons—a tradition later revealed by Swift in his Letter from the Grand Mistress, and which emerged as a Jacobite Masonic degree in the lodge at Stirling in 1745.³⁵

In 1598 James VI commissioned Schaw to undertake a major reorganization of the masons’ craft. As David Stevenson argues, in “organizing a national system of lodges for the first time,” Schaw virtually created modern Freemasonry.³⁶ The king and Schaw also acknowledged the claim of the St. Clair family of Roslin to be the hereditary “patrons and protectors” of the Masons. James now drew on his extensive study of Lullist techniques, especially as developed by Geronimo Cardano, Giordano Bruno, Alexander Dickson, and Sieur Du Bartas, and he recognized their importance to the designing and craft skills of architects and operative stonemasons.³⁷ Thus, in 1599 he ordered Schaw to include mastery of the Lullist “art of memory and science thereof” in the training of operative masons.³⁸ At the lodge of Kilwinning, the warden must elect six Masons, “the most perfect and worthiest of memory,” to take trial of the qualification of the whole masons . . . of their art, craft, science, and antient memory.”

To develop the Art of Memory, Lull drew upon the meditation techniques of Jewish Merkabah mysticism and the Sepher Yetzirah, in which the adept rebuilds the Temple of Jerusalem in his imagination.³⁹ As the Art developed, it involved the visualization of a building, palace, or temple in which images of intellectual concepts, historical facts, and/or geometrical relations were placed in special rooms, which facilitated their permanent placement in the initiate’s memory and mind.⁴⁰ In a condensed and simplified form, it was useful to the operative mason’s ability to visualize complex geometrical and structural relations through architectural imaging. The intense mental concentration sometimes produced a trance state, in which some practitioners believed that they achieved prophetic vision or “second sight.”

James VI was initiated into a lodge at Scone (ca. 1601), and he carried his Cabalistic-Lullist Masonic traditions south to England in 1603, when he became James VI and I, now “Great Britain’s Solomon.” Some sixteen years later, William St. Clair of Roslin immigrated to northern Ireland and presumbably took with him his Scottish Masonic traditions, for Swift would later gain access to them in Ulster. The remaining St. Clairs in Scotland continued their patronage of the craft for the rest of the century. After the death of James VI and I in 1625, his son Charles I was also initiated into Masonry and took a great interest in his father’s belief in Solomonic architecture, themes which he introduced into the mystical masques performed at the Stuart court.⁴¹ A chief designer and organizer of the masques was the great architect and Freemason Inigo Jones, whose craftsmen helped to construct the scenery and mechanical apparatus. Many of the symbols and themes of the royalist masques would later seem to emerge in the elaborate, theatrical rituals of 18th-century Jacobite and Franco-Scottish (Ḗcossais) “higher degrees.”⁴²

In 1630-31 a Scottish Mason, Henry Adamson, in anticipation of Charles I’s planned visit to Scotland, composed a long architecturally-themed poem, The Muses Threnodie, which was published in 1638. Adamson called upon the king to rebuild the great, eleven-arched stone bridge at Perth, which had been constructed by the master mason John Mylne père but was destroyed by a flood in 1621. In the process, he revealed the assimilation of Rosicrucian lore into Scottish-Stuart Masonry, which reinforced the Cabalistic-Lullist themes of prophetic vision:

Therefore I courage take, and hope to see
A bridge yet built, although I aged be;
More stately, firm, more sumptuous and fair,
Than any former age could yet compare.
. . . . . .
For what we do presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse,
We have the Mason word, and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright,
And shall we show what misterie we mean,
In fair acrosticks Carolus Rex is seen.
Describ’d upon that bridge in perfect gold,
. . . . . .
Loath would we be this misterie to unfold,
But for King Charles his honour we are bold.⁴³

Ron Heisler suggests that one possible acrostic of Carolus Rex is Roseal Crux, with the “L” taken as an imperfect “E.”⁴⁴

During the Cromwellian Interregnum that followed the execution of Charles I in 1649, many Scottish Masons fled to the Continent and Sweden, where for nearly ten years they successfully negotiated with Jews in Amsterdam and Swedes in Gothenburg to gain support for the restoration of the exiled Charles II.⁴⁵ In the 1650s, when the Cromwellian General George Monk occupied Scotland, he reportedly became a Freemason and, after initial skepticism, became a believer in the Scottish capacity for second sight.⁴⁶ Monk employed a Swedish military architect, Edouart Tessin, who was initiated in Edinburgh in 1652.⁴⁷ Tessin worked with John Mylne fils and thus gained access to the Scottish Masons’ Cabalistic-Lullist-Rosicrucian traditions. At the same time, Scottish sympathizers with Charles II formed a clandestine lodge in Gothenburg, from where they attempted to support restoration efforts. The lodge had received a charter from Edinburgh, probably in connection with the royalist collaboration of Sir John Maclean, a Scottish merchant in the port city.⁴⁸ The members subsequently gained permission from the Swedish king Carl XI to maintain the lodge.

After the death of Cromwell in September 1658, the Masons of Perth honored the late John Mylne and issued in December a provocative claim:

That as formerly we and predecessors have and had from the temple of temples building on this earth one uniform community and union throughout the whole world from which temple proceeded one in Kilwinning in this our nation of Scotland and from that of Kilwinning many more within this kingdom of which there proceeded the Abbey and Lodge of Scone, built by men of art and architecture . . . and was upheld by the Kings of Scotland . . .⁴⁹

The Masons then publicly reported that Mylne père had initiated James VI, “by the King’s own desire,” into the Lodge of Scone and that he maintained his membership until the end of his life.

As the royalists increased their overtures to Monk, he changed sides and, according to a report by the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay in 1741, Monk utilized Masonic networks to secretly organize support for the restoration.⁵⁰ That Ramsay revealed this to the Swedish ambassador in Paris, Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, a descendant of Edouart Tessin and recent Grand Master of Swedish Masonry, gives it a certain piquancy.⁵¹ During his exile, Charles II was initiated into Masonry, and after his restoration in 1660, he employed various Scottish “brothers” in high positions. The Scottish military engineer Sir Robert Moray, who had joined military and craft lodges in Newcastle and Amsterdam, was an enthusiastic Mason, with interests in Cabalism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism.⁵² He became not only the king’s confidant but an important founder of the Royal Society of Science.

Moray shared the belief in Masonry’s Cabalistic-Lullist traditions with Thomas Treloar, who in “Ye History of Masonry” (MS. 1665) utilized Hebrew royalist panegyric to stress the Jewish and Solomonic traditions of the restored fraternity. The text began with the inscription in Hebrew letters, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” an emblem of the Seal of Solomon signed “Solomon the King,” and concluded with a quote in Hebrew, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” This quotation from Psalm 2 was often applied to the radical Protestants of the Interregnum, and the rebellious heathen were subsequently admonished to serve the Lords’ anointed king. Treloar then recounted in English the story of Hiram the architect of Solomon’s Temple: “Master Hiram from near ye sea,/ A son of a widow was sent to me,/Solomon, I, King David’s Son.” Treloar praised kings Charles I and II as patrons of the Masons’ craft:

And after many days Charles did reign in ye land and lo his blood was spilled upon ye earth even by ye traitor Cromwell.
Behold now ye return of pleasant . . . . .[illegible] for doth not ye Son of ye blessed Martyr rule over ye whole land.
Long may he reign in ye land and govern ye Craft.
Is it not written ye shall not hurt ye Lords anointed.⁵³

Moray also shared with his friend Sir Christopher Wren, royal architect and Freemason, a serious interest in the model of the Temple of Jerusalem designed and constructed by Rabbi Leon, who had been befriended by Charles I’s widow in Holland and who dedicated to Charles II his treatise on the architecture of the Temple.⁵⁴ Richard Popkin notes that when Leon brought his models of the Temple and Tabernacle to London in 1675, he addressed Charles II “as if he and the monarch were part of co-equal worlds,” and their meeting was significant for the development of Freemasonry.⁵⁵ While in London, Leon designed a heraldic coat of arms for Masonic fraternity, which—as Lucien Wolf argues—was “entirely composed of Jewish symbols” and belonged to “the highest and most mystical domain of Hebrew symbolism.”⁵⁶ After the rabbi’s death in Holland, his son continued to exhibit the models over the next decade, and the heraldic coat of arms was reportedly adopted by Irish Masons in the 1680s. As mentioned earlier, Laurence Dermott referred to the grandson’s exhibit of Leon’s models and treatises, which he viewed in London in 1759-60 and which he considered part of the “Antient” Masons’ authentic traditions.

The Stuart interest in Leon’s theories was carried to Sweden by members of the Tessin family. Edouart Tessin and his son followed Monk to London, where they entered the architectural service of Charles II and Christopher Wren. The Tessins then worked on the construction of the great stone mole in the Stuart colony of Tangier. In 1678 their kinsman Nicodemus Tessin, who became royal architect in Sweden, visited London, where Wren and the king invited him to join the royal service.⁵⁷ Though he chose to move on to Rome and the neo-Rosicrucian court of Queen Christina, he was possibly initiated in London, for his son Carl Gustaf Tessin reported that his father, after his return from his travels, was proud to call himself a “Master Mason.”⁵⁸ The Tessin family would remain strong supporters of the Stuarts over the next decades and, as noted earlier, in 1738 Carl Gustaf served as the secret Grand Master of Ḗcossais Masonry in Sweden—a system with strong Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, and chivalric themes.

Meanwhile in Restoration England, the royalist rejuvenation of Stuart building projects was threatened after the death of Charles II in February 1685, when the succession to the throne of his brother, James, Duke of York, a convert to Catholicism, was threatened by militant Protestant agitation. James had recently earned the respect of the Masons in Edinburgh, when he resided there in 1679-82, for he led “an architectural renaissance with the rebuilding of Holyrood Palace” and other major stone constructions.⁵⁹ After his return to London, he realized that he needed support from the Scottish Masons to sustain his claim to the British throne, and he urged his supporters to travel south to join his campaign. Thus, in March 1685, the Edinburgh Masons printed a broadside titled Caledonia’s Farewell to the Most Honourable, James Duke of Perth, etc., Lord High Chancellor, and William, Duke of Queensbury, etc. Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, When Called Up by the King. The rather bizarre publication revealed the Masons’ belief in the power of mystical mathematics, elements of the Cabalistic and Lullist traditions, to support the Stuarts’ royalist cause:

Go on, My Lords, and prosper; go repair
To Court; and kiss the Hands of the TRUE HEIR
Of fivescore Kings and Ten
. . . . . .
An Heir refus’d (but by no Builders) strange,
Is now Chief Corner-Stone! O happy change,
. . . . . .
What speaks the *HUNDREDTH and ELEVENTH; since HE
Stands such from FERGUS, in the Royal Tree.
Consult but Euclid, take the Architect
Alongst; try, what one Figure doth direct
Those Arts of Kin; see, what Supports the All
Of the Cementing Trade.⁶⁰

The asterisk pointed to a lengthy footnote which utilized convoluted mathematical, geometrical, and architectural argument—what the author described as “this cryptic way of compting” and “strange and mysterious algebra”—to prove that the number 111 justified James’s claim to the crown. The addressee, James Drummond, 1st Duke of Perth, was active in the colonization of New Jersey, and the Masonic historian of the colony claimed that he and his patron, the Duke of York, were both Freemasons.⁶¹

As the campaign to exclude James from the throne intensified, the Jewish community worried that they would lose the protection provided to them by Charles II. Ten years after Rabbi Leon’s visit, they perhaps sensed a common cause with the Scottish royalists and Masons. After Charles’s death on 6 February 1685, over the next two months Jewish representatives presented James VII and II with a loyal address on parchment and visited his palace five times.⁶² Their actions would long be remembered and resented by anti-Jacobites. Writing in 1748, in the wake of the recently crushed Jacobite rebellion, the novelist Henry Fielding—now the Hanoverian government’s main propagandist—wrote that on 6 February 1685, the “Jacobite rabbins tell us . . . one of the Angels came to Whitehall . . . and brought with him a Commission from Heaven,” which he delivered to the Duke of York, which proclaimed that he “was indefeasibly created King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.”⁶³ He furthered argued, “as there is so great an Analogy between the Jews and the Jacobites, so hath there been the same likeness between their Kings.” Claiming that the Scots circumcised themselves after Culloden, he linked Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons in an unholy trio.⁶⁴

Though Fielding invented the angel story, he drew upon actual events in the early days of James’s reign. In May 1685 the Jewish community in London was forced to petition the new king for protection from Protestant merchants who determined to revoke their freedoms. James responded positively and in November issued an order to stop all proceedings against the Hebrews; he encouraged them to “quietly enjoy the free exercise of their Religion.” David Katz argues that the king “gave the Jews of England what amounted to a Declaration of Indulgence,” but he notes that it was inextricably linked with the disputed issue of the king’s prerogative, which meant that Jewish and Catholic rights were connected and equally vulnerable.⁶⁵ Like his grandfather and father, James objected to all violence in the name of religion, and in February 1687 and May 1688 he issued full Declarations of Indulgence for Scotland and England. He determined to establish toleration “by law, that it should never be altered by his successors.”⁶⁶ Despite widespread support from merchants and artisans, the policy of “liberty of conscience” roused even more intense anti-Catholic agitation.

In June 1688, Queen Mary of Modena, wife of James VII and II, delivered a baby boy, an event which shocked the anti-Catholic opposition into a radical new course. The story was spread that there was no royal birth, for a baby had been brought to the palace in a warming pan. Protestant broadsheets were published claiming that the baby was fathered by the king’s Jesuit confessor upon a nun. Of such fables are revolutions made. It was in this turbulent political atmosphere that Jonathan Swift and the students in Dublin issued their comical Masonic satire in July 1688. Small wonder that they were punished by a worried university administration. After William of Orange and his seasoned troops invaded England in November 1688, James fled to France and then to Ireland, where his followers—now called the Jacobites—were defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. According to French and Irish Masonic tradition, the exiled Jacobite soldiers carried with them to France their Scots-Irish lodge traditions, especially those of military field lodges.⁶⁷

Despite the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty, the Scottish Masons maintained their “ancient” traditions. In 1689-91 a Presbyterian minister and antiquarian, Robert Kirk, reported that the Scottish Mason Word was “like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Jachin and Boaz, the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple.”⁶⁸ Kirk visited synagogues in London and studied the Jewish mystical traditions, and David Stevenson notes that he hinted at the Masons’ Cabalistic symbolism.⁶⁹ Like Henry Adamson earlier, Kirk also linked Masonic initiation with the achievement of “second sight.”⁷⁰ Further testimony to the continuation of the Cabalistic themes of Scottish Masonry came from the English Jacobite George Hickes who, while hiding from the Whig government in Scotland, visited the “ancient” stone tower house at Roslin in 1697. He recorded that,

The Lairds of Roslin have been great architects and patrons of building for many generations. They are obliged to receive the mason’s word, which is a secret signal masons have through out the world to know one another by. They allege it is as old as Babel . . . Others would have it no older than Solomon.⁷¹

While Hickes investigated the Mason Word, he also studied the Scottish capacity for second sight.⁷² Two years later in London, he spent much time with a visiting Swedish scholar, Eric Benzelius, a serious student of Cabala, and he may have confided his information on “ancient” Scottish Masonry to him.

Over the next decades, as the Jacobites in Britain and abroad continued their struggle against the Williamite and then Hanoverian governments, there is little documentation on their Masonic networks, though a copy of a Masonic song, evidently circulated by exiled Jacobites in Paris in 1705, has come to light.⁷³ In London Jonathan Swift moved cautiously from Tory to crypto-Jacobite sympathies, and in 1710 he began a close friendship with Count Carl Gyllenborg, Swedish ambassador, who married into an English Jacobite family and strongly supported the Stuarts.⁷⁴ Swift would later write that he had planned to move to Stockholm in order to serve Gyllenborg and King Carl XII, if the Hanoverian government’s persecution of him got any worse.⁷⁵ In 1710-13 Gyllenborg patronized a young Swedish student-scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg, during his three-year residence in England. Swedenborg was the brother-in-law of Benzelius, and he was reportedly initiated into craft Freemasonry while in London.⁷⁶ He definitely attended the Masonic ceremony when Christopher Wren, Wren’s son, and the “free and accepted Masons” celebrated the completion of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Swedenborg called “the Temple.” According to a Swedish Masonic tradition, Wren served as Grand Master in 1710.⁷⁷

Though Freemasonry at this time was predominantly Jacobite in its political leanings, the disaffected initiates worried that their secret networks were vulnerable to government spies. In 1713 a Jacobite poet attached to a 1677 copy of the Old Charges of Freemasonry a poem titled “The Prophecy of Brother Roger Bacon.” He praised the present Queen Anne, half-sister of the exiled James VIII and III, who was believed to be sympathetic to a Stuart restoration. He related in bawdy terms the disastrous policies of the Whigs, who were ousted by the Queen’s Tory ministry but who were now trying to infiltrate Jacobite Masonry:

Free Masons beware Brother Bacon advises,
Interlopers break in & Spoil your Devices.
Your Giblin & Squares are all Out of Door,
And Jachin & Boaz shall be Secrets no more.⁷⁸

However, when Anne died in August 1714, the Jacobites were too faction-ridden to successfully oppose the accession of Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, who became King George I. The failure of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715-16—which had been led by the Freemasons, John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar; James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater; James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde; George and James Keith, Scottish Earl Marischal—precipitated another flood of exiles to Sweden and the Continent.⁷⁹ In 1717 Swift’s friend Gyllenborg was arrested in London for organizing the Swedish-Jacobite plot, which (according to Claude Nordmann) utilized international Masonic networks.⁸⁰ Gyllenborg had worked closely with Francis Francia, known as the “Jacobite Jew,” who provided financial and Masonic support to the Jacobites over the next decades.⁸¹ The Francia family’s loyalty to the Stuarts would be shared by other Jewish Freemasons, such as the stockbroker and poet Moses Mendez, who visited Swift in Ireland and whose unpublished Jacobite poems are now preserved in a notebook in the library of the Grand Lodge of London.⁸² These Jewish Masons continued to believe in the Stuarts’ policy of “liberty of conscience.”

In 1717, in response to the perceived role of Jacobite Masons in the Swedish plot, four London lodges organized the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster, dedicated to support the Hanoverian succession and Whig government.⁸³ It is from this year that Laurence Dermott in Ahiman Rezon dated the divergence of “Modern” Freemasonry from the “Antient” Masonry of York, Ireland, Scotland, and the Jacobite diaspora. He explained that “About the year 1717 some joyous companions” in London, who had passed through a “very rusty” degree, resolved to form a lodge of themselves, but none of them “knew the Master’s part,” so they “made up” a new composition with some “fragments of the old order.”⁸⁴ Not only did they change the placement and usage of Masonry’s symbolic tools (compass, square, plumb rule, level), but they abolished “the old custom of studying Geometry in the Lodge,” and instead focused on heavy drinking and feasting. Rejecting the Scots-Irish practice of the mixing of gentlemen and artisans in the lodge, they changed the wearing of the craftsman’s apron in order to avoid looking like “so many mechanics.”

Recognizing that the “Moderns” had deteriorated because of the arrogance and inattention of their aristocratic officers, Dermott gave a long list of great men in history who “were not only poor Men, but many of them of a very mean extraction. The wise philosopher Socrates, was the son of a poor stone-carver” (i.e., an operative mason).⁸⁵ He compared them to those upper class, modern Masons, who were “preferr’d to Places or Offices of great Trust, and dignified with Titles of Honour, without having the least claim to Courage, Wit, Learning, or Honesty”—criticism especially targeted at the current Whig Grand Master, William, 5th Lord Byron, a drunken and absentee leader who during his five-year tenure neglected the fraternity while he raced horses and gambled.⁸⁶ His message was effective, and the Antients attracted increasing numbers of lower- and middle-class artisans and shop-keepers.

Dermott also refuted Anderson’s claim that Christopher Wren “neglected” the lodges and thus fell from power, and he reported the political motives behind the attacks upon Wren and his supporters among the traditional Masons. The upstart architect William Benson had earned George I’s favor by his virulent propaganda against the Swedish king Carl XII and his ambassador Gyllenborg.⁸⁷ After attempting a purge of Wren’s craftsmen, Benson made fraudulent claims that the House of Lords was collapsing and needed total renovation. Dermott concluded that “the master masons then in London were so much disgusted at the treatment of their old and excellent grand master, that they would not meet nor hold any communication under the sanctions of his successor Mr. B-ns-n.”⁸⁸ Though the operative Masons in London “were struck with a Lethargy that which seemed to threaten the London lodges with a final dissolution,” the lodges in Scotland and York “kept up their antient formalities, customs, and usages, without alteration,” from whence they “may justly be called the most antient etc.”

Dermott’s sardonic descriptions of the detachment of “modern” speculative Masonry from its “ancient” operative roots pointed back to the struggle between Whig-Hanoverian versus Tory-Jacobite Masons—a struggle which intensified in Britain and abroad. It was among the exiled Jacobites in France that the chivalric traditions revealed by Swift began to emerge more prominently among the Stuart-supporting Masons. Since 1714 the Earl of Mar, an initiated Mason and brilliant architect, had used the “Mason Word” to ensure secret communication and political loyalty among Jacobites in Britain, France, and Russia.⁸⁹ He also worked closely with Gyllenborg during the organization of the Swedish-Jacobite plot. Over the next years, the Gyllenborg family would collaborate with the Tessins in developing Swedish Ḗcossais Masonry as a support system for the Stuart cause. While in exile in 1722, Mar and his Scottish protégé Andrew Michael Ramsay proposed to the Stuart Pretender, James VIII and III, the establishment of a Royal Military Order of Knights in Scotland with the purpose of “Restoring Scotland to its ancient Military Spirit.”⁹⁰ James approved the proposal and replied that it should be called “The Restoration Order.” According to Edward Corp, this chivalric order was Masonic in nature, and Mar served as its Grand Master.⁹¹ Mar then undertook a campaign to get Ramsay appointed as governor-tutor to the three-year old Prince Charles Edward Stuart in Rome.⁹²

In 1722-23, as Hanoverians and Jacobites struggled for dominance in the English Grand Lodge, and as James Anderson worked on his pro-Hanoverian Constitutions, a Jacobite poet on 15 February 1723 published a lengthy, bawdy challenge to the Grand Lodge, which was impatiently awaiting the publication of Anderson’s official history. In The Free-Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem, the “ancient” Mason hinted at the Jewish mystical themes of Scots-Irish Masonry, noting that “Some likewise say our Masons now/ Do Circumcision undergo,/ For Masonry’s a Jewish custom.”⁹³ This hint would be elaborated a year later by Swift, who in his Letter from the Grand Mistress, wrote about the Cabalistic manipulation of Hebrew letters and numbers and “of the Cabala, as Masonry was called in those days.”⁹⁴

Scottish Masons had long proudly accepted the nationalist tradition that they were descended from or assimilated with the Jews, thus becoming a “Covenanted” nation.⁹⁵ This claim was used by hostile critics to attack the Scottish supporters of the Stuarts, beginning with James Howell’s assertion, frequently reprinted from 1652 to 1699:

The first Christian Prince that expelled the Jews out of his territories was that heroic King, our Edward the First, who was such a scourge also to the Scots, and it is thought diverse of these banished Jews fled to Scotland, where they have propagated since in great number, witness the aversion that nation hath above all others to hogs-flesh.⁹⁶

That this charge was foisted on the Scots in northern Ireland is suggested by the repetition of it by John Toland, the Ulster-born radical who studied Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry in Scotland. A staunch anti-Jacobite, Toland in 1714 reminded the English archbishops (whom he had long castigated) that, “you know how considerable a part of the British inhabitants are the undoubted offspring of the Jews (to which the old Irish can lay no claim).” To support this claim, he asserted: “A great number of them fled to Scotland, which is the reason so many in that part of the Island, have such a remarkable aversion to pork and black-puddings to this day, not to insist on other resemblances easily observable.”⁹⁷

The author of the Hudibrastick Poem also countered government suspicions about the Jacobite Masons’ practice of secret political intrigue:

From hence they’ve been for Traitors taken,
But still have Masons saved their Bacon;
. . . . . .
And since they’ve been, at times, suspected,
They never once have been detected:
As Plotters and Confederates,
Whose Heads are placed on Poles and Gates.⁹⁸

The bawdy Masonic poem became a best seller, with many re-prints, and it evidently pushed Anderson two weeks later to finally publish the Grand Lodge Constitutions, which in turn provoked Swift to issue his burlesque history. As noted earlier, the Letter from the Grand Mistress drew upon the older Scots-Irish Masonic traditions that Laurence Dermott would later uphold. In 1725 the Freemasons in Ireland announced the election of Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, to succeed as Grand Master of their Grand Lodge, which had been in existence for some time. Rosse, who had been close to the Jacobite, Philip, Duke of Wharton, former Grand Master in England, was also accused of Stuart sympathies.⁹⁹ It is suggestive that Swift, who was friendly with Wharton in Dublin, continued to admire the “Hell-fire” duke throughout his well-publicized Jacobite-Masonic intrigues.¹⁰⁰

In 1725 the exiled Jacobites in Paris organized the first documented lodge in France, and their members included many young Irish and Scottish initiates, who sometimes came from families in which Masonic membership was hereditary.¹⁰¹ One initiate, the thirteen year-old James Drummond, 3rd Duke of Perth, was the grandson of the 1st Duke, to whom the Edinburgh Freemasons addressed their Stuart appeal in 1685. Another youngster was the sixteen year-old Irish exile, Richard Talbot, 3rd Earl of Tyrconnell, great-great nephew of the 1st Earl of Talbot, former Jacobite Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Edward Corp notes that the young man’s Masonic affiliation was based on family tradition.¹⁰² Decades later, Laurence Dermott was probably aware that his kinsman Clement MacDermott was a member of the Parisian lodge. As with the Talbots, Masonry was a MacDermott family tradition.

Many of the Parisian initiates resided at the palace of St. Germaine-en-Laye, where the Earl of Mar also lived at this time. Mar was currently the target of a slander campaign by the exiled English Jacobite Bishop Francis Atterbury, and he evidently hoped the Masonic lodge could consolidate his support among the Scots and Irish. He wrote that it was necessary for “the Scots and Irish to be well together,” for they share common bloodlines and traditions and “ought to look on one another as brothers.”¹⁰³ Though Mar and his collaborator Andrew Michael Ramsay were not listed as initiates of the Parisian lodge, they were close to many of the initiates and probably operated behind the scenes. Of the three co-founders, Sir Hector MacLean, was a special protégé of Mar; Charles Radcliffe had marched with the Scottish Highlanders in 1715 and became the confidant of Ramsay; and Francis Heguerty represented the Irish “Wild Geese.” Ramsay would subsequently have a significant influence on the development of Ḗcossais themes and rituals, which found expression in his allegorical novel, The Travels of Cyrus (French and English editions from 1727 to 1730). In recognition of their close friendship, he inscribed a copy to Mar.¹⁰⁴

In Ramsay’s correspondence with Swift, he credited the Irish satirist with inspiration for his universalist and ecumenical ideas about religion.¹⁰⁵ He was especially influenced by A Tale of a Tub (1704), in which Swift drew upon his wide reading in Hermetic, Cabalistic, and Rosicrucian writings in his satire on religious sectarianism. It seems certain that Ramsay also knew of Swift’s Masonic affiliation and his authorship of the Letter from the Grand Mistress. Like Swift he stressed the importance of the Jewish Cabala to Masonry. In 1724, when he was in Rome as tutor to the young Prince Charles Edward Stuart, he conversed with a heterodox Jew, whose library contained rare Cabalistic works and who became a Freemason.¹⁰⁶ In 1727, in The Travels of Cyrus, he featured Eleazar, a Jewish Cabalist, as the most impressive of the mentors for the young Prince Cyrus. Through Eleazar’s voice, he affirmed that “the Religion of the Jews was not only the most ancient, but the most conformable to reason.” He further discussed “the Principles upon which the allegorical Expressions of the Cabbalists are founded,” noting that “If we strip their Mythology of this mysterious Language, we shall find in it sublime Notions.”¹⁰⁷ He especially recommended “the works of the Rabbins Irira, Moschech, and Jitzack, which Rittangelius has translated in his Cabbala Denudata.” In autumn 1736, as Ramsay prepared his famous oration for the Grand Lodge in Paris, he wrote Thomas Carte, a fellow Jacobite Mason, “I am curious in everything that regards the Jewish antiquities. I look upon the Rabbinical Cabbala as the Jewish mythology which is not to be despised.”¹⁰⁸ He was also interested in Pierre Allix’s writing “upon the Trinity known to the Jews,” a key theme among Christian Cabalists.

In his Oration, delivered on 26 December 1736, Ramsay elaborated Swift’s brief references to the linkage between the chivalric orders and Freemasonry, in a move that further distanced Jacobite and Ḗcossais Masonry from the English Grand Lodge system:

King Solomon wrote in hieroglyphic characters, our statutes, our maxims and our mysteries and this ancient book is the original Code of our Order . . . The great Cyrus . . . appointed Zerubbabel as Grand Master of the Lodge of Jerusalem and instructed him to lay the foundations of the Second Temple, where the mysterious book of Solomon was deposited. This book was preserved for twelve centuries in the Temple of the Israelites, but after the destruction of the Second Temple . . . this authentic record was lost until the time of the Crusade, when a part of it was rediscovered after the relief of Jerusalem.¹⁰⁹

When the Christian crusaders returned to their homelands, they preserved the secret science, and the union of the lodges of St. John in all countries was copied from the Israelites when they built the Second Temple, “while some handled the trowel and compasses, others defended them with Sword and Buckler.”

One day after Ramsay’s speech, Charles Radcliffe, now Jacobite 5th Earl of Derwentwater, was elected Grand Master of the Ḗcossais system. He had joined his older brother, James, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, when their troop was led by a ballad-making stonemason and six of his operative brothers. W.E. Moss argues that the Radcliffes were also Freemasons, and that Charles determined to honor James, his executed brother, when he co-founded the lodge in Paris in 1725.¹¹⁰ As Grand Master, Derwentwater worked with Ramsay to revive the chivalric traditions that he and James had earlier practiced in the quasi-Masonic, secret society of the “Knights of Walton-le-Dale.”¹¹¹ Ramsay characterized Derwentwater as a “martyr de la Royauté et de la catolicité,” who wanted to “ramener icy tout a son origine, et restituter tout sur l’ancien pied.”¹¹² For Ramsay and Derwentwater, the “ancient footing” was the traditional practice of Masons in Scotland, Ireland, and northern England (the latter centered in York, close to the home territory of the Derwentwater family).

Ramsay’s plan to initiate the French king, Louis XV, into “our sacred mysteries” and then to praise him as “chief of the confraternity,” was frustrated by the anti-Jacobite chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, in March 1737.¹¹³ However, in September Derwentwater did succeed in initiating an important Swedish diplomat, Count Carl Frederick Scheffer, into the “sacred mysteries.” He provided Scheffer with a warrant to establish Ḗcossais lodges in Sweden, and his political ally Carl Gustaf Tessin subsequently served as secret Grand Master. As Andreas Önnerfors has argued, Swedish Freemasonry became a support system for the Jacobites and eventually part of the state apparatus.¹¹⁴

Ramsay also sent his discourse to two former friends of Swift, the Duke of Ormonde and Reverend George Kelly, Anglo-Irish Masons then resident in Avignon. Kelly planned to translate it into English for publication by James Bettenham, a Non-juring printer in London. More importantly, in December the Jacobite agent Colonel Daniel O’Brien wrote to Lord Dunbar at the Stuart court in Rome, informing him about recent Masonic developments and the impact of Ramsay’s oration. In January 1738 Dunbar replied, “L’histoire de secret des francs-maçons est tout à fait plaisante et j’espère que vous n’oublierez certes pas de m’envoyer copie de la deposition, car nos Princes sont dans une grande curiosité de savoir ce secret.”¹¹⁵

Ramsay’s oration, with its hints at mystical illumination and military prowess, must have appealed to the eighteen-year-old Charles Edward, who hoped to become a Mason when he came of age. According to a Scottish oral tradition, the rebellious prince secretly defied his overly-prudent father and joined the Jacobite lodge in Rome, which included some of his staunchest supporters. Unfortunately, the documentation for his initiation may have been in the missing page, which was torn out of the surviving lodge journal.¹¹⁶ Though his major biographer Frank McLynn initially believed that the prince did not advance “beyond simple curiosity” about Freemasonry, after further international research he changed his mind and referred to Charles Edward “and his fellow freemasons,” arguing further that the prince became “a leading light in eighteenth-century freemasonry.”¹¹⁷

After the papal crackdown on Freemasonry culminated in the Bull In Eminenti (April 1738), the Jacobite Masons continued to meet in France, where the Bull was not implemented, and in Ireland, where Catholics continued to join the lodges.¹¹⁸ It was in 1738 that dissentions within the “Modern” Grand lodge in London led many Irish Masons to reject the innovations in rules and rituals and to distance themselves from the seemingly arrogant and ineffective aristocratic leaders of the “Moderns.”¹¹⁹ In 1741, as Ramsay’s Cabalistic and chivalric themes were adopted by more and more Ḗcossais lodges, he became the close friend of Carl Gustaf Tessin, now Swedish ambassador to France, and confided to him the claim that General Monk had utilized Masonic networks to organize the restoration of Charles II in 1660.¹²⁰ It was probably no coincidence that around 1741, a Jacobite officer in Normandy, Chevalier Claude MacMahon, established a chapter of the “Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning” and sent emissaries to England to open clandestine lodges in support of the Stuart cause.¹²¹ Some Masonic historians believe that Ramsay and Derwentwater were secretly involved with the Royal Order, and there is a murky tradition of a Swedish origin (possibly connected with the Ramsay-Tessin collaboration and Swedenborg’s secret visit to London in 1740).¹²²

Over the next three years, various Jacobite and Ḗcossais Masons claimed to revive the Order of the Knights Templar, and the Swedes believed that Prince Charles Edward Stuart succeeded (“succedit”) to the Grand Mastership in 1743.¹²³ The Templar rites were often connected with the Royal Arch, especially in Ireland, where agents from York and the Continent recruited initiates to the Royal Arch. Though it is unknown what Laurence Dermott thought of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46, he surely was aware of the participation of many Templar and Royal Arch Masons in the armies of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.¹²⁴ Thus, his joining a Royal Arch lodge in Dublin in 1746 occurred within a fraught political context.

Dermott’s family had long been friendly with the Anglo-Irish King family, whose leaders served as the earls of Kingston.¹²⁵ James King, the 4th Earl of Kingston, played a publicly neutral role in politics, but the Hanoverian government suspected him of continuing the Jacobite sympathies of his father, John King, the 3rd Earl.¹²⁶ In 1714 a politically-vulnerable Swift was aware of the 3rd Earl’s Jacobite intrigues, which he feared were “all Chimeraes,” and in 1722 he knew that father and son were accused of enlisting men for the service of the Pretender (during the Atterbury Plot).¹²⁷ In 1726 the Kingstons were again accused of receiving commissions from James III to recruit for the Irish brigade in France.¹²⁸ Perhaps to alleviate such suspicion, son James joined a loyalist London lodge in June 1726.¹²⁹ They were still liable to prosecution, for in September 1727, when Kingston père and his son were in Paris, the Jacobite Mason Daniel O’Brien wrote to James III that “Kingston is here with his family and tells me to assure you of his loyalty.”¹³⁰

After his father’s death in February 1728, the 4th Earl converted to Anglicanism, and joined the Irish House of Lords but, as David Dickson observes, Kingston remained “a shadowy figure for all his great wealth,” and “he played no role in Irish parliamentary life.”¹³¹ He then utilized his Masonic connections to reduce his political vulnerability and to safeguard his reputation. In 1729 he was elected Grand Master of the English Grand Lodge, where he sponsored Masonic theatrical benefits and wrote an ecumenical prologue for a performance at Drury Lane.¹³² In the versified prologue, he affirmed military loyalty to the government, while also admitting the possibility of fraternal bonds between opposing soldiers. In 1731 he served not only as Grand Master of Ireland but as Grand Master of Munster, where the majority of Masons were Tories and Jacobites.¹³³ Dickson notes that there was “a distinct political aura” surrounding the early sponsors of Freemasonry in Munster. It was “Tory, tolerant of passive Jacobitism, and seems to have avoided association with ostentatious Whig and Hanoverian symbols,” while serving those Protestant and Catholic gentlemen who “were uncomfortable with the dominant political values.”¹³⁴ In 1731 Kingston was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, a position he resumed in 1735, when his delegation of Irish Masons was rudely refused admission to an English lodge meeting. Ric Berman argues that this was the beginning of the serious split between the Irish and English Grand lodges.¹³⁵

Kingston’s interest in the theater may have involved him in a Masonic scandal in Paris, for William Parker argues that in 1737 he was seduced by “la fameuse Carton,” a dancer at the Paris Opera, into revealing the secrets of lodge ceremonies, which she passed on to the anti-Masonic police chief Herault, who had them published.¹³⁶ An English translation, “The Reception of a Freemason,” was then published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 8 (January 1738). In 1743 Kingston was still viewed with suspicion by the government, and he was ordered into the custody of the Black Rod for non-attendance at the House of Lords.¹³⁷ In May 1745, after other aristocrats refused, he agreed (reluctantly?) to serve again as Irish Grand Master. Throughout the Jacobite rebellion from August 1745 to April 1746, he acted cautiously, as intense surveillance over suspected Jacobites was maintained by the government in Ireland. While he was kept informed about political and Masonic developments in Scotland, he quietly held private lodge meetings in his Munster residence. When he received news of the Jacobites’ defeat at the battle of Culloden in April 1746, he held a special, well-publicized Masonic meeting to celebrate the news—a move possibly aimed at avoiding further government suspicion.¹³⁸

It is unknown if Dermott, master of a lodge affiliated with Kingston’s Grand Lodge, was also kept informed about the Scottish developments in 1745-46. But he may well have heard about the alleged installation of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” as Grand Master of the Masonic Order of the Temple.¹³⁹ On 30 September 1745, James Drummond, 3rd Duke of Perth, wrote from Edinburgh to his kinsman David, Lord Ogilvy, about a secret Masonic ceremony held in the sanctuary of Holyrood Palace:

It is truly a proud thing to see our Prince in the palace of his Fathers, with all the best blood of Scotland around him. He is much beloved by all sorts, and we cannot fail to make the pestilent England smoke for it . . . . On Tuesday, by appointment, there was a solemn Chapter of the ancient chivalry of the Temple of Jerusalem . . . not more than ten knights were present, for since my Lord of Mar demitted the Office of Grand Master, no general meeting has been called, save in your North Convent. Our noble Prince looked most gallantly in the white robe of the Order, and took his profession like worthy Knight; and . . . did vow that he would restore the Temple higher than it was in the days of William the Lyon. Then my Lord Atholl did demit as Regent, and his Royal Highness was elected Grand Master. I write you this knowing how you love the Order . . . ¹⁴⁰

As noted earlier, the 3rd Duke of Perth was the grandson of the 1st Duke of Perth, to whom the Freemasons of Edinburgh sixty years earlier addressed Caledonia’s Farewell to support the claim of Charles Edward’s grandfather to the British throne. He had joined the Jacobite lodge in Paris in 1725 and spent many years in France. After the failure of the rebellion in 1746, Lord Ogilvy escaped to Sweden and then France, where he introduced the Royal Arch degrees into the Ogilvy regiment of the French army.¹⁴¹ “Lord Atholl” was William Murray, Marquis of Tullibardine, who was attainted by the British government after he participated in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion and whose title as 2nd Duke of Atholl was shifted to his loyalist brother, James Murray, a Hanoverian Mason who supported the government. Exiled to France, Tullibardine was still considered the authentic Duke of Atholl by the Jacobites. A confidant of the Earl of Mar, he reportedly succeeded to the mastership of the Restoration Order after Mar’s death in 1732. Edward Corp argues that Mar’s Order was Masonic in nature and formed the basis of the Scottish Order of the Temple.¹⁴²

Though some critics have questioned the authenticity of Perth’s letter, his language was repeated in September 1745 by Charles Edward and George Kelly (translator of Ramsay’s oration), when they wrote a letter to their fellow Mason in Spain, the Irish Jacobite Sir Charles Wogan, who reported “ye Prince’s kind expressions to me, which were all in the style of the ancient chivalry.”¹⁴³ Further support for the Holyrood ceremony was provided by an oral tradition which was carried to Sweden by Swedish Masons who fought with Charles Edward’s forces in Scotland.¹⁴⁴ In 1771, when Gustaf III—an Ḗcossais Mason—became king of Sweden, he and Count Scheffer paved the way for an “Antient” lodge, affiliated with Dermott’s Royal Arch system, to open in Stockholm.¹⁴⁵ A strong supporter of the Jacobites, Gustaf believed that the Stuart prince was the hereditary chief of Stuart Freemasonry and Grand Master of the Masonic Knights Templar. He may have heard about the alleged ceremony in the sanctuary of Holyrood from Magnus Wilhelm Armfelt, a Swedish officer who fought with the Jacobite troops from the beginning to the end of the 1745 rebellion.

In 1783, after seven years of communications with the exiled Charles Edward, carried out by Gustaf’s two brothers and other Swedish Masonic agents, the king travelled to Italy to meet his hero. He was accompanied by Gustaf Mauritz Armfeldt, son of Magnus Wilhelm, during his sessions with the elderly Charles “III.” Elis Schröderheim, Gustaf’s secretary and fellow Mason, recorded that the Swedish king and Stuart “pretender” got together in a series of private and emotional meetings, where they “worked on mysteries” in order “to raise the Temple of Jerusalem” and to “achieve the re-establishment of the Sanctuary.”¹⁴⁶ Charles Edward gave Gustaf a patent naming him successor as Grand Master in the event of his death, and he signed it with a Masonic sigil and Templar cross.

Despite the efforts of Gustaf III and Charles Edward to keep their meetings secret, a suborned French member of the Swedes’ entourage reported on it to Horace Mann, the elderly British ambassador, who had been a member of the Whig-affiliated lodge in Florence in the 1730s. On 30 December 1783, Mann wrote to John Udny, British consul at Leghorn, that the Swedish king has taken steps “which though they may appear ludicrous, are not less certain”:

It is supposed that when the Order of Templars was suppressed and the individuals persecuted, some of them secreted themselves in the High Lands of Scotland and that from them, either arose, or that they united themselves to, the Society of Free Masons, of which the Kings of Scotland were supposed to be hereditary Grand Masters. From this Principle, the present Pretender has let himself be persuaded that the Grand Mastership devolved to him, in which quality, in the year 1776, He granted a Patent to the Duke of Ostrogothia [Gustaf’s brother] (who was then here), by which he appointed him his Vicar of all Lodges in the North, which that Prince some time after resigned . . . . Nevertheless the King of Sweden during his stay obtained the Patent from the Pretender in due form by which He has appointed his Swedish Majesty his Coadjutor and Successor to the Grand Mastership of Lodges in the North, on obtaining which the French Gentleman [Mann’s spy] . . . assured me that the King expressed his greatest joy.¹⁴⁷

After Charles Edward’s death in April 1788, the Masonic patent was produced from the Swedish archives and sealed with Gustaf III’s approval. It noted that the Stuart prince, under the title of “Eques a Sole Aureo,” had succeeded (“succedit”) as Grand Master in 1743.¹⁴⁸ This lends more credibility to the claim for his installation as Grand Master in Holyrood in 1745. The elaborate Swedish Rite, which Gustaf believed was rooted in “antient” Stuart, Scots-Irish traditions, utilized Templar, Royal Arch, Rose-Croix, Heredom, and Swedenborgian rituals.¹⁴⁹ Like Swift, Ramsay, and Dermott, Gustaf’s brother, Duke Carl of Soudermania, believed that Cabala formed the core of authentic Freemasonry. When Carl presided over lodge meetings in the Sanctuary of the royal palace, he wore a white satin robe featuring an elaborate embroidery of the Sephirotic Tree of the Cabala.¹⁵⁰

But now, let’s return to 1746, when the Jacobite rebels were defeated at Culloden and when Laurence Dermott joined the Royal Arch in Dublin. Given the on-going brutality of the English government’s reprisals in Scotland—supported by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (the “Butcher”); Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond; and William van Keppel, Earl of Albermarle (all Hanoverian Masons)—it is not surprising that Dermott, a Protestant Irish patriot from a family with extensive Jacobite connections, would proceed cautiously when he moved to London in 1748.¹⁵¹ He first attended a Modern lodge but was so disillusioned that he joined with other dissident Irish Masons in promoting the separatist Grand Lodge of the Antients.¹⁵² Serving as Grand Secretary over the next decades, he echoed Ramsay and Derwentwater in his determination to re-establish “authentic” Freemasonry upon its ancient footing, which he believed had been preserved in York, Scotland, Ireland, and among the Jacobite diaspora abroad. He argued that foreign Masons felt at home in the universalist “Antient” system (it resembled the higher degrees they had experienced in Ḗcossais lodges on the Continent and in Sweden). We do not know what his attitude was to the continuing Jacobite intrigues and plots from 1746 to 1753, but the public decapitation of the Jacobite Mason, Dr. Archibald Cameron, in London in 1753 must have influenced his apolitical stance three years later in Ahiman Rezon (1756).

In 1756 Dermott approached several Irish Masons to accept the Grand Mastership of the Antients: Lord George Sackville, son of the Duke of Dorset, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; William O’Brien, 4th Earl of Inchiquin; William Ponsonby, son-in-law of the Duke of Devonshire; and William Stewart, 3rd Viscount Mountjoy and Earl of Blessington, who finally accepted.¹⁵³ The background of the new Grand Master revealed the complex and often ambiguous political context in which the Antients functioned. Blessington’s father, the 2nd Viscount Mountjoy, had been friendly with Swift during Queen Anne’s Tory reign, and in 1725 he was included on a list of Stuart supporters compiled by the Duke of Wharton.¹⁵⁴ After the 2nd Viscount’s death in 1728, Swift maintained a connection with the family.

Though the 3rd Viscount publicly supported the Hanoverian succession, he protested against the government when it imposed unfair policies on Ireland. In 1731 he joined the Bear and Harrow lodge in London, which was under the Grand Mastership of the crypto-Jacobite, Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk.¹⁵⁵ In 1734-35 he resented the snobbish treatment of himself and other Irish peers by government ministers and England Grand Lodge officials. Ric Berman observes that this disrespect led to the Irish Masons alienation, which was reflected in “a changed relationship” between Irish and English Freemasonry.¹⁵⁶ In 1737 Mountjoy supported Swift in one of his quarrels with the government, and in 1738-40 he served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland with great popular support. Though he had been criticized as an avaricious “absentee landlord,” he actually implemented many charitable projects in Ireland. Dermott especially praised Mountjoy for his philanthropic efforts during the Irish famine of 1740. However, his political disaffection apparently increased, for in early 1745—the year when he was made 1st Earl of Blessington—his name was included on a list of Jacobite supporters that was sent to the French government.¹⁵⁷ In the years after the defeat of the rebellion, he maintained a low profile, and little is known about his political attitude.

Most curious was Dermott’s previous approach to Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, an English Grand Lodge Mason, who had served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland during the rebellion of 1745-46, when he successfully pacified the Irish while advocating harsh policies against the Scots. He had been close to Swift and sometimes acted in opposition to the ministries of George II and George III. Though considered a free-thinker, Chesterfield had been friendly with the Rosicrucian Mason, the Comte de Saint-Germain, who was in London in 1745 and 1749, and he realized that contemporary diplomats needed to be familiar with the esoteric traditions so prevalent among Continental Masons.¹⁵⁸ As we shall see, he would later be named as a member of the Royal Order of Heredom and Kilwinning.

In 1758, as Irish disaffection from English policies intensified, the Grand Lodge of Ireland completely severed its ties with the “Modern” Grand Lodge and affiliated with the Antients’ system. Dermott welcomed this move, and two years later he praised “the great” William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, who earned the admiration of Irish and American patriots for his defense of their right to determine their own taxation.¹⁵⁹ Though Dermott avoided explicit political statements, the Antients continued to attract opponents of George III and his Hanoverian government. From 1760 to 1766, Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kelly, served as Grand Master of the Antients, while also serving as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland (1763-65). Kelly, a brilliant violinist and composer, brought with him a knowledge of Ḗcossais degrees, knowledge gained during his musical studies on the Continent, where he met many Stuart sympathizers. He came from a Jacobite family—his father had been imprisoned in 1745 for supporting the rebellion, and his father-in-law was the famous Jacobite poet and physician Archibald Pitcairn.¹⁶⁰ When in London, Kelly associated with French and Swedish Masons, and he later joined an Ḗcossais lodge in Gothenburg.¹⁶¹ Over the next decade, many Antient Masons earned additional chivalric and Rose-Croix degrees through these Ḗcossais contacts.

In 1764 Dermott became less discrete in his political statements, for he elaborated upon his earlier note concerning the Porteous Affair, which in 1736 provoked intense Scottish nationalist protests against the English government of George II. In 1756 he had included “The Secretary’s Song” by James Anderson, published in the 1738 Constitutions, in which Anderson scorned the opposition journal, The Craftsman, for suggesting that “those who hang’d Captain Porteous, at Edinburgh, were all Free-Masons, because they kept their own Secrets.”¹⁶² In 1764 Dermott explicated the allusion and added a new Masonic twist to the story:

The Affair was thus, Captain Porteous having committed Murder, was tried, convicted, and ordered for Execution at Edinburgh; but his Friends at Court prevailed upon the Queen to reprieve him; this gave Umbrage to the People, who assembled at Night, broke into (and took him out of) the Prison, from thence to the Place of Execution, ordered him to kneel down; which was also done by the whole Company, who joined him in Prayers for a considerable Time, and then all laid hold on the rope and hawled him up as they do on a Man of War. It is remarkable that they all wore white leather aprons, which (by the way) is a certain Proof that they were not Free-masons.¹⁶³

This claim that the protesters wore white aprons was the first to be published and reinforced the charge that they were Masons, despite Dermott’s ironical statement to the contrary. He was probably aware that the Porteous rioters were heroes to Scottish and Irish nationalists, and their actions in 1736 inspired many of the Jacobite Masons who organized the rebellion of 1745.

It is unknown what Dermott thought about the Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning, which operated under the radar in England and Scotland, for some Antients’ members were also initiates of its London branch, known as the “Rite of Seven Degrees.” It was directed by an immigrant French engraver, Lambert de Lintot, who had served under the Jacobite Colonel MacMahon in Rouen, where he was initiated in 1745.¹⁶⁴ By 1764 in London, Lintot had developed a complex, dramatic, and compelling series of higher degrees, including Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, Royal Arch, and Templar themes.¹⁶⁵ The Rite drew on and embellished the traditions revealed by Swift, Ramsay, and even Swedenborg.¹⁶⁶ Many “Antient” Irish Masons received instructions from Lintot’s “College of Higher Degrees.”¹⁶⁷ Most surprising are the references to Lord Chesterfield in the records of the Royal Order in 1764, when he was portrayed as a participant in the elaborate rituals of initiation.¹⁶⁸ Did his increasing disgust with Hanoverian politics and corruption turn him towards Jacobitism in his old age? Where Lintot’s system deviated from Dermott’s was in the explicit Jacobite commitments of its members. Dermott’s attitude was more ambiguous, for he was sympathetic to Irish and Scottish patriots and former Jacobites, but publicly loyal in his statements and writings. His political and religious ambiguity was shared by the next Grand Master of the Antients, Thomas Mathew, chosen in 1767. Mathew came from Tipperary, Ireland, and the family was kinned to and confidants of the dukes of Ormonde. Thomas’s father, George Mathew, was raised as a Catholic but in 1709 converted to Protestantism in order to gain a place in the Irish parliament, where he campaigned for Catholic relief.¹⁶⁹ In 1715 he was reprimanded by the Irish House of Commons for his support of the Jacobite Constantine Phipps, the ejected former Lord Chancellor, a cause also supported by Swift.¹⁷⁰ He then travelled to France, where he lived for several years while supervising from abroad the ambitious renovations on Thomastown Castle, his great ancestral home. He was a Freemason and spent much time studying architecture and operative masonry. David Dickson notes that Mathew and his family shared the Tory-Jacobite sentiments of the Kingstons and majority of Masons in Munster.¹⁷¹ In 1719 he hosted Swift, who spent four happy months at the castle, where he discussed with the Dean their mutual interests in architecture, stonemasonry, and landscaping.¹⁷² In 1727, after a disputed election, Mathew was again seated as an M.P. and signed the required oath of abjuration (which rejected the legitimacy of the Pretender, James “III”). However he continued to support Irish nationalist causes and Catholic relief, while his Protestant kinsmen continued to intermarry with Catholics.¹⁷³

George’s son Thomas Mathew, who at age ten and fourteen probably met Swift during the Dean’s visits to Thomastown Castle in 1719 and 1723, followed the family’s Masonic tradition.¹⁷⁴ In 1759, he served as Provincial Grand Master of Munster, and when he visited the lodge at Youghal, he approved the practice of the Royal Arch rite as a “regular” and “good” part of Freemasonry (he was aware that it had been used in Youghal since 1743, if not earlier).¹⁷⁵ Like his father George, Thomas Mathew periodically resided in France, where he held “a regular Lodge among his own domestics,” and he was familiar with the Ḗcossais higher degrees. In the 1761 election for the Irish House of Commons, Thomas was accused by his evangelical Protestant opponent of “having undue Catholic sympathies,” and the tactic worked, leading to Thomas’s political defeat.¹⁷⁶ In response, Thomas’s only son and heir Francis, who had been raised as a Catholic, converted to Protestantism in 1762 and gained a seat in the Commons. Like his father and grandfather, he continued to work for Catholic relief. For three years from 1767, when Thomas Mathew served as Grand Master, many Catholics joined Protestants and Jews in the internationally expanding system of Antients’ lodges, which boasted of their “universality.”

In 1771 Thomas Mathew was succeeded as Grand Master of the Antients by John Murray, 3rd Duke of Atholl, son of Lord John Murray, the famous Jacobite army officer, who fought in the 1745 rebellion.[^177] The 3rd Duke’s paternal uncle, William Murray, Marquis of Tullibardine, had been considered the authentic Duke of Atholl by the Jacobites. As noted earlier, Tullibardine allegedly succeeded the Earl of Mar as Regent of the Restoration Order and demitted the Grand Mastership of the Masonic Order of the Temple to “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in Holyrood in 1745. He died as a prisoner in the Tower in 1746 and thus avoided execution with the three Jacobite Grand Masters. Because his Jacobite father was under a cloud, young John Murray was brought up by the Hanoverian 2nd Duke of Atholl, James Murray, a loyalist Mason, and sent to Eton for schooling. On the outbreak of the ’45, the sixteen year-old John wrote in great distress to the 2nd duke:

My father has declared for the Pretender, which of all things I was most afraid of, but as your Grace, who has so long been in charge of my education, is for King George . . . I shall lay down my life . . . in his service. For although my father be not so much in the wrong . . . as he has been for that party always . . . yet it would be the greatest baseness in me . . . not to be for King George as I have a commission from him . . . though I love my father . . . yet it is impossible for me think that he has acted right.¹⁷⁷

Young John had been given a commission in the regiment of Lord Loudoun, a former Hanoverian Grand Master, and he offered to use his broadsword or musket in the service of George II, but he was not allowed to serve and in 1746 was deprived of his commission.

Determined to make John his heir, the childless 2nd duke sent him to Germany for further schooling in “an attempt to distance him from his father and from allegations of his being a Jacobite sympathizer.”¹⁷⁸ He was ordered to make no contact with his exiled father and to be presented to George II at his court in Hamburg in 1752. After his father‘s death in 1760, the new 3rd Duke of Atholl entered parliament and appeared publicly loyal, but suspicions about his possible Jacobitism lingered. According to his son, John Murray, the 4th Duke, when his father returned from the Continent, he was “so far intimidated, in consequence of the suspicion attached to him as a partisan of the House of Stuart,” that in 1765 he parted with his sovereignty over the Isle of Man for “an inadequate consideration.”¹⁷⁹ By the time the 3rd duke became Grand Master of the Antients and of Scotland in 1771, he had become “something of a recluse and lost much of his popularity”; in 1774 he drowned himself in a “fit of delirium.” In 1775 he was succeeded as Grand Master of the Antients and of Scotland by his son, who raised a Highland regiment to fight the American rebels (though they were sent to Ireland instead and later mutinied). The Murray/Atholl family reflected the familial divisions and political challenges experienced by many Scottish and Irish “Antient” Freemasons, as the fall-out of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion continued over the next decades. While the dukes of Atholl tried to escape the shadow of Jacobitism, the cross-over between Antients and Seven Degrees members became more politically risky, as the Jacobites reacted optimistically to the rebellious activities of the colonists in north America. The British government took seriously reports that Charles Edward, newly married and less alcoholic, planned to support the Americans.¹⁸⁰ Moreover, many “Antients” in the colonies were active in opposition to George III, thus provoking increased surveillance over potentially seditious Masons at home and abroad. In 1772 Lambert de Lintot had worked closely with the crypto-Jacobite Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort, Grand Master of the Moderns, when the duke tried to link the English fraternity with the Ḗcossais systems abroad.¹⁸¹ His activities renewed government suspicion about his Jacobitism and led to increased pressure on Lintot and the Royal Order. In 1774 Lintot and seventy of his lodge members in London voted to remove their Grand Master, Charles Edward Stuart, as recorded by Lintot on 19 June:

The Wise and Sovereign Chapter of the Knights of the Eagle Rose Croix assembled have decided to recognize His Royal Highness Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland . . . for Grand Master, Grand Commander, Conservator, Guardian of the Pact and Sacred Vow of the Christian Princes, in the place of the said Charles Edward [erasure here] at present [erasure] for the reasons alleged in the present Chapter, and particularly that they will give no recognition to any constitution in the name of the said Charles Edward, in the three kingdoms of Great Britain, as contrary to our present deliberation and to the vows we make . . . for the prosperity of the House of Brunswick . . .¹⁸²

The document provides rare evidence that lodges loyal to the Young Pretender, Charles “III,” continued to function in the British Isles.

However, the Rite of Seven Degrees did not become completely pro-government, for Henry Frederick was not the “Butcher” Duke of Cumberland (d. 1765). Instead, he was the son of the late Frederick, Prince of Wales (d. 1751), who had led the opposition Masons in their struggle against the Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole, affiliated with the “Modern” Grand Lodge. And Henry Frederick carried on his father’s contrarian attitude, targeting the repressive policies of his despised older brother, King George III. In 1775 Henry Frederick returned from a year’s refuge in France and Italy and immediately set up a court in opposition to the king.¹⁸³ Having been made a peer of Ireland, he especially disliked the government’s oppressive policies towards Ireland and America. He became Grand Patron of the Royal Arch in 1774, but it is unclear what role he played in the Order of Heredom and Kilwinning, which was no longer overtly Jacobite but still linked with the politics of disaffection in greater Britain.¹⁸⁴ It is also unknown if Henry Frederick was aware that “some kind of invitation was made by the Bostonians in 1775” that Charles Edward Stuart, his predecessor as Grand Master of Heredom, “should be the figure head of a provisional American government.”¹⁸⁵

At the same time in France, a lodge authorized by the Heredom chapter in Edinburgh initiated a young man into the higher degrees and promised to instruct him in “la science hermetique qu’a établi le f. Raymond Lulle surnommé le docteur illumine, sous le titre de l’aigle noire Blanche et Rouge R.C.”¹⁸⁶ Thus, the Scottish, French, and probably Irish initiates of Heredom maintained the “ancient” Lullist traditions of Scotland and Ireland, which had been revealed by Swift in his Letter from the Grand Mistress (1724). Like the Heredom chapters, Dermott and the “Antients” preserved the “ancient” Scots-Irish-Yorkist traditions described by Swift and Ramsay, while they opened the doors in Britain and America to the Ḗcossais “higher degrees.”

Though Dermott was initially more politically cautious than Lambert de Lintot, his system expanded exponentially among the rebellious colonists in America, while Lintot’s went even further underground. What Dermott and Lintot shared was their revival of the older “Celtic” Masonic traditions and embellishment of newer chivalric rituals. Their achievements meant that the Cabalistic-Lullist-crusader themes enacted in the mid-fifteenth century at Roslin Chapel and in the late sixteenth-century at Stirling Castle survived and even flourished in the darkened “Antient” lodges of the eighteenth-century “Enlightenment.”

*  *  *

This essay draws on the much more detailed discussion and documentation in my four books, plus subsequent up-dated information: Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden, 2002); William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London, 2006); Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven: Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons in Early Modern Sweden (Leiden, 2012); and Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics: From Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding (forthcoming).

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1. Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981), 121.↩︎

2. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710 (1988; Cambridge, 1993), 77-124.↩︎

3. David Stevenson, “The Scottish Origin of Freemasonry,” in Jennifer Carter and Joan Pittock, eds., Aberdeen in the Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1987), 39.↩︎

4. Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991), 206. For Jacobite influences on Ḗcossais Masonry, see Louis Trebuchet, “Références aux Stuart dans les rituels maçonniques du XVIIIe siècle,” La Règle d’Abraham, 36 (2013), 95-126.↩︎

5. For the decline in the English Grand Lodge and rise of the Antients, see Ric Berman, Schism: The Battle that Forged Freemasonry (Brighton, 2013).↩︎

6. W.J. Chetwode Crawley, “Notes on Early Irish Freemasonry, No. VII,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 16, part 1 (1903), 69. Henceforth cited as AQC.↩︎

7. Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. David Wooley (Frankfurt am Main, 1999-2014), IV, 473-74 and n. 1. Swift had also been a close friend of Mountjoy’s father.↩︎

8. Ibid., IV, 160, 261; James Eyre Weekes, The Cobler’s Poem (Dublin, 1745).↩︎

9. Ken MacDermot Roe, “Freemasonry and the MacDermotts”; Edward Corp, Lord Burlington: The Man and His Politics (Lewiston, 1998), 20-21↩︎

10. Sean Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism and Freemasonry,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 9 (1994), 82; K. Roe, “Freemasonry,” 1-9.↩︎

11. R. Berman, Schism, 22-23.↩︎

12. The Jacobite-Masonic roles of Derwentwater, Kilmarnock, and Balmerino, as well as Dr. Cameron, are discussed in my forthcoming book, Masonic Rivalries.↩︎

13. Laurence Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (London, 1756), 16.↩︎

14. Ibid., 26.↩︎

15. The pamphlet was reprinted in Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies. By Dr. Swift. The Eleventh Volume (London, 1746), 173-86.↩︎

16. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1756), xiv-xv.↩︎

17. Ibid., 43.↩︎

18. W.M. Bywater, Notes on Laurence Dermott and his Work (London, 1884),↩︎

19. Robert F. Gould, The History of Free Masonry (London, 1885), IV, 436.↩︎

20. The long-lasting attraction of Jewish Masons to the Antients’ system was affirmed by Dr. Isaac Wise, a Scottish Rite member, in The Israelite (1855): “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from beginning to end, with the exception of only one by-degree and a few words in the obligation. . . . The beauty and pride of Masonry is its universal character, its tendency to fraternize mankind.↩︎

21. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1756), 46-47.↩︎

22. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (London, 1764), xxiv-xxvi.↩︎

23. For Leon’s Masonic influence in England and Ireland, see my book, Restoring the Temple, 698-705, 771-72.↩︎

24. Ibid., 758-62. The Tripos was reprinted in Sir Walter Scott’s edition of The Works of Jonathan Swift (Edinburgh, 1824), VI, 240-59. See also George Mayhew, “Swift and the Tripos Tradition,” Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 85-101.↩︎

25. Jonathan Swift, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1962), V, 328-30. John Harding, the printer, was frequently arrested for seditious and Jacobite publications, and he would die in prison in April 1725.↩︎

26. Frances Yates, “The Art of Ramon Lull,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute [JWCI] 17 (1954), 155; Moshe Idel, “Ramon Lull and the Ecstatic Kabbalah,” JWCI, 51 (1988), 70-74; Anthony Bonner, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Lull Reader (Princeton, 1993), 189.↩︎

27. M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 113-122; D. Stevenson, Origins, 52-76.↩︎

28. Henrik Bogdan, “An Introduction to the High Degrees of Freemasonry,” Heredom: Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society, 14 (2006), Appendix. In post-Franco Spain, the great polymath and mystic was honored as the patron “saint” of the Ramon Lull lodges.↩︎

29. M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 26-51.↩︎

30. James VI, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh, 1955), I, 32-32. Spelling modernized.↩︎

31. William Fowler, The Works of William Fowler, eds. H.W. Meikle, J. Craigie, and J. Purves ((Edinburgh, 1940), II, 171.↩︎

32. Aonghus MacKechnie, “James VI’s Architects and their Architecture,” in Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch, eds., The Reign of James VI (East Linton, 2000), 163-65.↩︎

33. M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 224-25.↩︎

34. David Mathew, James I (Tuscaloosa, 1968), 25. A. Mackechnie, “James VI’s Architects,” 155-58.↩︎

35. J. Swift, Prose, V, 329; Charles Cameron, “On the Origin and Progress of Chivalric Freemasonry in the British Isles,” AQC, 13 (1900), 167.↩︎

36. D. Stevenson, Origins, 53, 56.↩︎

37. For their influence on James and the Scottish court, see my Restoring the Temple, Chapter Four.↩︎

38. D. Stevenson, Origins, 85-96.↩︎

39. M.K. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 20-27.↩︎

40. Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966).↩︎

41. Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London, 1994), 17↩︎

42. For later staging of these “masques,” C. Lance Brockman, ed., Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Minneapolis, 1996).↩︎

43. Henry Adamson, The Muses Threnodie (Edinburgh, 1638), 31-32.↩︎

44. Ron Heisler, “Rosicrucianism: the First Blooming in Britain,” Hermetic Journal (1989), 53.↩︎

45. For the negotiations, see M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 529-44.↩︎

46. Michael Hunter, The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second-Sight in late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Martlesham 2001).↩︎

47. M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 513, 571-75.↩︎

48. Ibid., 542. “Geschichte der Freimaurer-brüderschaft in Schweden und Norwegen,” Latomia, 7 (1846), 175. The lodge was mentioned by Johan Starck, Apologie des Francs-Maçons (Philadelphie, 1779), 68; also by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues [1778], trans. A. Cohen (London, 1927), 99-100.↩︎

49. Robert Mylne, The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland and Their Works (Edinburgh, 1893), 128-29. Spelling modernized.↩︎

50. A.F. von Büsching, Beiträge zu der Lebensgeschichte Denkwürdiger Personen (Halle, 1783-89), VI, 329.↩︎

51. Tessin’s role as secret Grand Master was revealed by his brother-in-law, Count Nils Bielke, in 1738; letter in Stockholm, Riksarkivet: Bergshammer Samlingen: Nils Bielke, #512. A, f. 20.↩︎

52. David Stevenson, “Masonry, Symbolism, and Ethics in the Life of Sir Robert Moray, FRS,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114 (1984), 405-31.↩︎

53. MS. reproduced by John Thorpe in “Old Masonic Manuscript. A Fragment,” Lodge of Research, N. 2429 Leicester. Transactions for the Year 1926-27, 40-48.↩︎

54. Arthur Shane, “Jacob Jehudah Leon of Amsterdam (1602-1675) and his Models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle,” AQC, 96 (1983), 146-69.↩︎

55. Richard Popkin, “Some Aspects of Jewish-Christian Theological Interchange in Holland England, 1640-1700,” in J. Van den Berg, ed., Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht, 1988), 24↩︎

56. Lucien Wolf, “Anglo-Jewish Coats of Arms,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, (1894- 95), 156-57.↩︎

57. I must correct a misprint in my entry, “Charles Edward Stuart,” in Le Monde maçonnique des Lumières, eds. Charles Porset and Cecile Revauger (Paris, 2013), in which Nicodemus Tessin’s visit to London is dated 1778, rather than the correct 1678.↩︎

58. Duc de Luynes, Mémoires du Duc de Luynes sur la Cour de Louis XV (Paris, 1860), XII, 113-14.↩︎

59. Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (London, 2000), 47.↩︎

60. Caledonia’s Farewell (Edinburgh, 1685); for the Masonic authors, see Hugh Ouston, “York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679-1688,” in John Dwyer, Roger Mason, and Alexander Murdoch, eds., New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1983), 135-36.↩︎

61. R.W.D. McGregor, “Contributions to the Early History of Freemasonry in New Jersey,” The Master Mason (December 1925), 98-100.↩︎

62. David Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford, 1994), 146-52.↩︎

63. Henry Fielding, The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Wesleyan,1975), 282, 285.↩︎

64. Ibid., 95-98, 103, 109.↩︎

65. David Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford, 1994), 149-50.↩︎

66. M. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple, 751-56; Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “For the Sake of Liberty of Conscience: Pierre Bayle’s Passionate Defense of James II,” 1650-1850, 8 (2003), 235-55.↩︎

67. Pierre Chevalier, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie Française (Paris, 1974), I, 5; Phillipe Morbach, “Les regiments Ḗcossais et irlandais à St. Germain-en-Laye: myth ou réalité maçonnique?,” in Edward Corp, ed., L’Autre exile: Les Jacobites en France au début de XVIIIe siècle (Montpellier, 1993), 143-55.↩︎

68. Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth (1691), ed. S. Sanderson (London, 1976), 88-89.↩︎

69. D. Stevenson, Origins, 133-34.↩︎

70. M. Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 177.↩︎

71. Historical Manuscripts Commission 29: 13th Report. Portland MSS., appendix ii (1893-94), II, 56.↩︎

72. M. Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 172-78, 183-84.↩︎

73. Alain Mothu and Charles Porset, “A propos du secret des Francs-Maçons: une reference Jacobite (1705)?,” in Charles Porset, ed., Studia Latomorum & Historica: Mélange offerts à Daniel Ligou (Paris, 1998), 326-33.↩︎

74. For Swift, Gyllenborg, and Swedenborg, see M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, Chapters Two and Five.↩︎

75. Jonathan Swift, The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1939-68), V, 11-12.↩︎

76. Rudolph Tafel, “Swedenborg and Freemasonry,” New Jerusalem Messenger (1869), 267-68. For other claims about his initiation, see M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 53-57, 660-61.↩︎

77. M. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 92.↩︎

78. G.W. Speth, “Two New Versions of the Old Charges,” AQC, 1 (1888), 128-29.↩︎

79. For their Masonic affiliation, see M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Five and Six (forthcoming).↩︎

80. Claude Nordmann, Le Crise du Nord au Début de XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1962), 10; and Grandeur et Liberté de la Suède (1660-1772) (Paris, 1971), 424.↩︎

81. For Francia, see M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 72, 103-07, 124.↩︎

82. J. Percy Simpson, “Moses Mendez, Grand Steward, 1738 (1690-1756),” AQC, 18 (1905), 104-09.↩︎

83. J.R. Clarke, “The Establishment of the Premier Grand Lodge: Why in London and Why in 1717?”, AQC, 76 (1963), 5. Also, M.K. Schuchard, “La revue The Post Man et les Constitutions de Roberts (1722),” Le Règle d’Abraham, 30 (2010), 16-21; revised English version “Jacobite vs. Hanoverian Claims for masonic ‘Antiquity’ and ‘Authenticity’,” Heredom, 18 (2010), 123-86.↩︎

84. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1764), xxix-xxx.↩︎

85. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1756), viii-ix.↩︎

86. R. Berman, Schism, 120-21, 128-30.↩︎

87. For Benson’s anti-Swedish and anti-Wren efforts, see M. Schuchard, “La revue The Post Man,” 3-63; and “Jacobite vs. Hanoverian Claims,” 134-37, 157.↩︎

88. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1764), xxvii-xxix.↩︎

89. Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1789-1725 (Leiden, 2012), 132-33, 174-77, 185-88. For a recent revisionist, positive evaluation of Mar’s career, see Margaret Stewart, The Architectural, Landscape and Constitutional Plans of the Earl of Mar, 1700-1732 (Dublin, 2016).↩︎

90. Stuart Erskine, “The Earl of Mar’s Legacy to Scotland and to this Son, Lord Erskine,” Publications of the Scottish Historical Society, 26 (1896), 206-15.↩︎

91. Edward Corp, “The Jacobite Community at Saint-Germain after the Departure of the Stuart Court,” in Allan MacInnes, Kieran Gorman, Lesley Graham, eds., Living with Jacobitism, 1690-1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London, 2014), 29-31.↩︎

92. I here correct another misprint in my entry, “Charles Edward Stuart,” in Le Monde maçonnique des Lumières, in which the prince is described inaccurately as the “son” of James VII and II, rather than the correct “grandson.”↩︎

93. Anon., The Free-Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem (London, 1723), 11.↩︎

94. J. Swift, Prose Works, V, 325-26, 329-30.↩︎

95. Arthur Williamson, “‘A Pil for Pork-Eaters’: Ethnic Identity, Apocalyptic Premises, and the Strange Creation of the Judeo-Scots,” in R.B. Waddington and A.H. Williamson, eds., The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After (New York, 1994), 237-58.↩︎

96. James Howell, The Wonderfull, and Most Deplorable History of the Latter Times of the Jews (1652; London, 1699), Epistle Dedicatory.↩︎

97. John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain (London, 1714), 37. I discuss Toland’s Rosicrucian and Masonic affiliations in Scotland in Masonic Rivalries (forthcoming).↩︎

98. The Freemasons: An Hudibrastick Poem, 22.↩︎

99. S. Murphy, “Jacobitism,” 78; John Heron Lepper and Philip Crossle, History of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ireland (Dublin, 1925), 71.↩︎

100. J. Swift, Correspondence, II, 335, 494.↩︎

101. For the known members, see Pierre Chevallier, Le Première Profanation du Temple Maçonnique (Paris, 1968), 18-23.↩︎

102. Edward Corp, ed., Lord Burlington—The Man and His Politics (Lewiston, 1998), 11, 20-21.↩︎

103. Maurice Bruce, “The Duke of Mar in Exile, 1716-1732,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th s., 20 (1937), 169,171.↩︎

104. M. Stewart, Architectural . . . Mar, 266.↩︎

105. J. Swift, Correspondence, III, 233; M.K. Schuchard, “Swift, Ramsay, and the Jacobite-Masonic Version of the Stuart Restoration,” in Richard Caron, ed., Ḗsoterisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire Symbolique: Mélange offerts à Antoine Faivre (Leuven, 2001), 491-505.↩︎

106. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James Osborne (Oxford, 1966), I, 52. His contact was Joseph Athias, a learned Jew and Freemason in Leghorn.↩︎

107. Andrew Michael Ramsay, The Travels of Cyrus (London, 1727), II, 134-37.↩︎

108. Bodleian Library: Carte MS. 226, ff. 415-16, 419 (Paris, 15 September and 22 November 1736).↩︎

109. Quoted in Charles Batham, “Chevalier Ramsay—a New Appreciation,” AQC, 81 (1968), 299-303.↩︎

110. W.E. Moss, “Freemasonry in France in 1725-1735,” AQC, 47 (1934), 105.↩︎

111. Ibid., 105; Leo Gooch, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-East England (Hull, 1995), 38-40, 81.↩︎

112. Françoise Weil, “Ramsay et la Franc-Maçonnerie,” Revue d’Histoire litteraire de la France, 63 (1963), 276-78.↩︎

113. Bodleian: Carte MS. Carte MS. 226, f. 398.↩︎

114. Andreas Önnerfors, “From Jacobite Support to a Part of the State Apparatus—Swedish Freemasonry between Reform and Revolution,” in Cécile Revauger, ed., Franc-maçonnerie au Siècle des Lumières (Pessac, 2006), 217-18.↩︎

115. Windsor Castle, Royal Archives: Stuart Papers: 203/163. I quote from the microfilm copy in the British Library.↩︎

116. W.J. Hughan, The Jacobite Lodge in Rome, 1735-1737 (Torquay, 1910), 10.↩︎

117. Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (Oxford, 1988), 533; and 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (2004; London, 2007), 79-80, 223.↩︎

118. On the political-Masonic context of the papal Bull, see M. Schuchard, “Les rivalités maçonniques de la Bulle in Eminente,” La Règle d’Abraham, 25 (2008), 3-48; revised English version in Heredom, 23 (2015), 55-106.↩︎

119. W. Bywater, Notes on Laurence Dermott, 1.↩︎

120. Von Büsching, Beiträge, VI, 329.↩︎

121. William Wonnacott, “The Rite of Seven Degrees in London,” AQC, 39 (1921), 132-69.↩︎

122. David Murray Lyon, “The Royal Order of Scotland,” The Freemason (4 September 1880), 393; George Draffen, “Early Charters of the Royal Order of Scotland,” AQC, 62 (1951), 325-26; James Fairburn Smith, The Rise of the Ecossais Degrees (Dayton, 1965), 51-53; Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 294-305.↩︎

123. Pierre Mollier, “Les Stuarts et la Franc-Maçonnerie: le dernier episode,” Renaissance Traditionnelle, 177-78 (2015), 72. 72. For the possible initiators of Baron von Hund in 1743, see André Kervella, Le Chevalier Ramsay: Une fierté ecossaise (Paris, 2009), 340, 349-51.↩︎

124. M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Nineteen to Twenty-one (forthcoming).↩︎

125. K. Roe, “Freemasonry,” 6-7.↩︎

126. Eamonn O’Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766 (Dublin, 2002), 200, 232, 377; S. Murphy, “Jacobitism,” 75-83.↩︎

127. J. Swift, Correspondence, I, 633-34; S. Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism,” 79.↩︎

128. D. Dickson, Old World Colony, 264-65.↩︎

129. R. Berman, Schism, 226.↩︎

130. Windsor, Royal Archives: Stuart Papers: 110/85.↩︎

131. D. Dickson, Old World Colony, 264-65.↩︎

132. Douglas Knoop, G.P. Jones, and Douglas Hamer, eds., Early Masonic Pamphlets (London, 1978), 208-09.↩︎

133. Lisa Meaney, “Freemasonry in Munster, 1725-1826” (M.A. Thesis: Mary Immaculate College, 2005), 35, 90, 183.↩︎

134. D. Dickson, Old World Colony, 264-65.↩︎

135. R. Berman, Schism, 13.↩︎

136. William E. Parker, “The Church and the Craft,” Philalethes: The Masonic Journal of Masonic Research and Letters, 5 (June 1994).↩︎

137. S. Murphy, “Irish Jacobitism,” 79-80.↩︎

138. L. Meaney, “Freemasonry,” 36.↩︎

139. For detailed discussion of the political and Masonic context of the ceremony, see M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Nineteen and Twenty (forthcoming).↩︎

140. James Denistoun, Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange (London, 1855), I, 81-82.↩︎

141. André Kervella, Le Mystère de la Rose Blanche: Francs-maçons et Templiers au XVIII e siècle (Paris, 2009), 354 n.21.↩︎

142. E. Corp, “Jacobite Community,” 29-31.↩︎

143. Henrietta Tayler, Jacobite Epilogue (London, 1941), 306.↩︎

144. For the arguments for and against the authenticity of Perth’s letter, see M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapter 20 (forthcoming).↩︎

145. G.A. Kupferschmidt, “Notes on the Relation between the Grand Lodges of England and Sweden in the Last Century,” AQC, 1 (1886-88), 207.↩︎

146. Elis Schröderheim, Anteckningar till Konung Gustaf IIIs Historia (Örebro, 1851), 84.↩︎

147. Kew. National Archives: FO 79/3.↩︎

148. P. Mollier, “Les Stuarts,” 72.↩︎

149. M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 723, 747-48.↩︎

150. Dan Eklund, Sten Svensson, and Hans Berg, eds., Hertig Carl och det Svenska Frimuriet (Uppsala, 2010), 136.↩︎

151. For their harsh policies toward Scotland and the Jacobite Masons, see M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Nineteen to Twenty-two (forthcoming).↩︎

152. W. Bywater, Notes on Laurence Dermott, 3-36.↩︎

153. R. Berman, Schism, 37-41.↩︎

154. Paul Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975), 161.↩︎

155. Norfolk’s private Jacobitism is documented in M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen (forthcoming).↩︎

156. R. Berman, Schism, 41, 230-31,↩︎

157. J. Colin, Louis XV and the Jacobites (Paris, 1901), 31.↩︎

158. M. Schuchard, Masonic Rivalries, Chapters Twenty and Twenty-three (forthcoming).↩︎

159. R. Gould, History, 442.↩︎

160. “Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kelly,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.↩︎

161. For Kelly’s foreign contacts, see M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 623.↩︎

162. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1756), 109.↩︎

163. L. Dermott, Ahiman Rezon (1764), 109.↩︎

164. W. Wonnacott, “Rite of Seven Degrees,” 63-91.↩︎

165. Lintot’s engravings and some letters are in London Grand Lodge library: “MS. Rituals from MS. Minute Book of Lambert de Lintot.”↩︎

166. Erich Lindner, The Royal Art Illustrated, trans. Arthur Lindsay (Graz, 1976), 136-46.↩︎

167. W. Wonnacott, “Rite of Seven Degrees,” 71.↩︎

168. London Grand Lodge library: BS. 624 Roy: Typescript, “Royal Order of Scotland Letter Book,” 52b, 68b-c, 128; BS 63/Hac/: N. Hackney, “Some Notes,” 74↩︎

169. John Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Ninetheenth-Century Ireland and Irish America (Amherst, 2002), 34-35.↩︎

170. Journals of the House of Commons of the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1761), IV, 127-28.↩︎

171. D. Dickson, Old World Colony, 264-65.↩︎

172. Thomas Sheridan, The Life of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin (London, 1784), 412-17.↩︎

173. J. Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade, 34.↩︎

174. For his probable return visit in 1723, see R.W. Jackson, “Dean Swift’s Tour of Munster,” Dublin Magazine (1943), XVIII, 33-39.↩︎

175. W. Crawley, “Notes on Irish Freemasonry,” 74-75.↩︎

176. J. Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade, 35.↩︎

177. “John Murray, 3rd Duke of Atholl,” in Romney Sedgwick, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715-1754 (London, 1970).↩︎

178. “John Murray, 3rd Duke of Atholl,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.↩︎

179. “Obituary of John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl,” Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1830), 463-64.↩︎

180. F. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 518-19, 614 n.100-02.↩︎

181. For Beaufort’s complicated intrigues with Charles Dillon and Lintot, see M. Schuchard, Emanuel Swedenborg, 677-96, 737.↩︎

182. W. Wonnacott, “Rite of Seven Degrees,” 75.↩︎

183. “Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and Stathearne,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.↩︎

184. While serving as Grand Patron of the Royal Arch from 1774 to 1790, he also served as Grand Master of the Moderns from 1782 to 1790—certainly an “ostensible paradox.”↩︎

185. F. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, 519, 614 n.100-02.↩︎

186. J.T. Thorpe, “Two French Documents,” AQC, 15 (1902), 97-98.↩︎